Partee Will Not Indict Cop In Shooting

November 03, 1989|By John Camper.

Cook County State`s Atty. Cecil Partee said Thursday he will not indict a Chicago police officer for the fatal shooting of a South Side man in an incident that some black activists have denounced as police brutality.

Partee said the statements of several of the people who claimed to have witnessed the Sept. 10 shooting did not hold up and that none provided any reliable information that could be used to prosecute Police Officer Noel Hartfield for the slaying of Leonard Banister.

He said the statements of ``at least two people close to the scene``

tended to corroborate Hartfield`s statement that his gun discharged accidentally when Banister grabbed his arm while being frisked for guns and drugs near the corner of 79th Street and Kingston Avenue.

Partee conceded that he might have spoken too hastily when he said, two weeks after the shooting that he intended to seek a grand jury indictment against Hartfield.

But noting that the shooting touched off three nights of violence by angry crowds, Partee added: ``If I said it wrongfully that we were going to

(seek an indictment), if it did in fact calm what might have been a riot, I think it might have been a justifiable kind of approach.``

Partee`s decision brought an angry blast from Conrad Worrill, head of the National Black United Front, who provided Partee`s office with the names of eight purported witnesses who said the shooting was murder.

``This is a blatant act of injustice,`` Worrill said, ``and I think he`ll feel the effects of this decision at the polls in the African-American community.``

Partee was appointed to his post last April after former State`s Atty. Richard Daley was elected mayor. Partee has announced his intention to run for a full term in next year`s election.

Partee said his investigators already had interviewed seven of the eight witnesses whom Worrill brought forward and none of them was persuasive. The eighth witness, he said, ``told us first that he saw the shooting, and later that he did not see it, but merely heard the shot. He declined to be interviewed further.``

Partee`s investigation upheld the findings of the Chicago Police Department`s Office of Professional Standards, which had ruled the shooting justifiable.

Most of the witnesses who had been interviewed by the OPS gave false addresses, Partee said. He said several of them changed their stories as many as three times when interviewed by his own aides, and some told stories that contradicted physical evidence.

For example, he said, one witness said the officer shot Banister in the back of the head, when the bullet actually entered the front. Another said the gun was on the officer`s hip when he fired it, which contradicts the medical examiner`s finding of the angle of the bullet.